Serpentine Lake

While walking along the bank of the Serpentine Lake in the Hyde Park in London early in the morning , it is a soothing experience to watch the different species of birds swimming in the lake. They nest on an island in the middle of the lake full of trees and bushes which provide a safe haven for them to breed and grow up unharmed by human beings as even bathing is not allowed in this lake.
A skein of gees and a badelynge of ducks took me back to more than fifty years when rearing ducks was one of the means of livelyhood in Kerala State. The children in our village loved to watch hundreds of ducks moving from place to place accompanied by their supervisors travelling with them in small woodden boats which can hardly accoommodate more than one person. They were in search of feeding grounds for these birds especially during the rice harvesting season when the famers used to rent their paddy fields for a very short period of time to the duck farm owners against certain number of eggs. They came from the southern districts of Kerala and spoke a slightly different dialect of Malayalam language. The children in our area listened to them with curiosity tinged with a little bit of astonishment. I still remember how children like me to used to wait for these eggs which were cooked by our moms in different syles and how we enjoyed the duck-egg specialities.

Duck eggs were also hatched by the villagers using a setting hen for domestic rather than commercial purposes. . The incubation period was more than three weeks. We used to wait eagerly to see beautiful ducklings emerging from the eggs at the end of the incubation period. When the hen moved with ducklings she looked as if was she was so proud to look after them like their step mother as they were not her own chicks. To look at the ducklings piercing the egg shells with their tender beaks in a hurry to step into this world was an explicable experience denied to the the children of today due to the onslaught of technology which has robbed them of such innocent pleasures and amusments .

Among the birds one can spot in the Serpentine Lake is moorhen which is the Europen version of Kulakkozhi in Kerala where they nest close to ponds which may be the reason why they are called Kulakkozhi which literally means Pondhen. Some of the European moorhen have a read line on the upper part of their beak making it more beautiful than their counterparts in Kerala . They are so light that they can comfortably walk over the thick layer of some water plants enveloping ponds . Its chicks resemble normal chicken except that the former is black in colour and have long legs. As a boy I had enjoyed watching stealthly these chicks moving with their mother who will run and hide as soon as they spot human beings. As a part of childish adventures, once I had chased a moorhen in attempt to catch the bird when it is too tired to fly or run. When I caught her in this way, it laid an immature egg out of fear its shell so soft as a balloon. In those days it had occured to me to steal some moorhen eggs from the nest and incubate them along with the normal eggs using a setting hen to see if the mother hen would recognise the strangers among her children and how she treated them . I had also stollen the chicks of kingfisher from its nest and tried to raise them and was extremely sorry when all of them soon died . Years later exactly in 2000 when we employed a crazy Tamil homenurse to look after our ailing mother during the last few days of her life it was a coincidence the homenurse stole some eggs from the kulakkozhi nest adjacent to the pond in front of our house but I asked her to return the them to the nest . It may be that I wanted to repent for my mischievous activities as a child.

BY THE FATHER